Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi, better known as Kullu, is an ecologist and conservationist.
He had always wanted a career in the outdoors, but he did not think about ecology and conservation until much later in life. His first tryst with the mountains happened as a mountaineer. But after spending time in the Himalayas for his mountaineering expeditions, he found a new love for the ecology of the place.
A master’s course in wildlife biology gave him his first opportunity to spend an entire winter following the bharal (wild sheep) in the remote Spiti Valley of Himachal Pradesh. After this, there was no looking back. Kullu went on to study the snow leopard in the Himalayas in India and the Altai mountains of Mongolia for his PhD. Since then, he has studied them in India, Nepal, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia.
Kullu is now the Director of the Snow Leopard Trust's India Program and a scientist with the Nature Conservation Foundation. He is a commissioning editor of the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology.
He is a CIFAR fellow (2023-2028). He was a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg Zu Berlin (2022), a recipient of the National Geographic Young Explorer (2011) and collaboration grants (2015), the Conservation Leadership Award grant (2020), and the British Ecological Society’s Southwood Prize winner (2013).
His first book, The Ghost of the Mountains, is about the ecology and conservation of the Snow Leopard.
Agent: Patrick Walsh